Wednesday, July 9, 2014

The Ambit of Books: Rodrigo Rey Rosa's Severina

Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s short novella, Severina, is almost
ready-made to please admirers of contemporary literary fiction. For one thing,
its principal characters are a book thief and a bookseller, and a love of books
- or perhaps more accurately, a “bookish impulse” that carries the narrator
“beyond the bounds of reason” - facilitates and mediates a love affair between these
two strangers. For another, it’s brimming with references to literature, including
several lists of books (stolen, shared, given away, accumulated) to send the
literarily curious on a hunt for new potential treasures (Émile Laoust’s volume
of Berber folktales, anyone?) as well as clues to possible resonances of these works
within Rey Rosa’s own. Severina also references more easily traceable
influences on Rey Rosa’s work, including his time in Morocco and tutelage under
Paul Bowles, since works by both Bowles and his wife Jane show up on the lists,
and Moroccan Arabic as well as an actual Moroccan also make appearances.
Perhaps most conspicuous, though, is the influence of Jorge Luis Borges, who, off
stage, even helps along the plot (or at least his personal library does – is
your interest piqued now?)

The narrator, unnamed co-owner of a bookshop started by
“eccentrics” “tired of paying through the nose for books chosen by and for
others,” strikes a tone perhaps all too recognizable to those obsessed by
literature:

Those were eventful days, or rather I
heard that they’d been eventful (there was a rash of lynchings in the inland
villages and a coup in a neighboring country, cocaine became the world’s number
one illicit substance, stagnant water was discovered on Mars, and Pluto
definitively lost its status as a planet), my life having shrunk once more to
the ambit of books; I had become another specimen of that sad type, the
bookseller with literary aspirations.

Into this “sad” life, a bit of color appears in the form of
a book thief with exquisite taste in literature, an attractive woman (I should
have said “colors” earlier in this sentence, since she always sports a
different one) who quietly slips into the bookstore, filches books, and
mysteriously manages to walk out without setting off the alarm, returning
several times. The narrator’s curiosity about her – and her book choices, which
“might help solve the mystery of a life that seemed bizarre and fantastic” –
trumps any indignation he feels about her transgressions. He allows her petty
larcenies to continue long enough for him to let her know that he knows what
she’s doing, and for him to fall in love with her.

But from the beginning Ana Severina Bruguera (sharp readers
may recognize that last name as the same of one of Borges’ publishers) is an
enigma difficult to pin down and as chameleon-like as the colors she wears. An
unidentifiable accent marks her as perhaps Italian, Honduran, Columbian or from
elsewhere. She lives or doesn’t live with an older man who may be her father,
husband, lover or grandfather (aptly named Señor Blanco, as though he’s a blank
page). She has several false passports on which she appears to travel about,
lifting books wherever she goes. Despite the novel’s Guatemalan setting, it
possesses a tangible internationalist quality, one made especially appealing
here by a suggestion that Severina and her companion seem almost fictions
themselves, emissaries from a world of books rather than from a specific,
identifiable country. The narrator’s sketchy knowledge about her arrives from
multiple sources; hearsay and rumor, the clerk of the pension where Severina
stays, Severina’s own cryptic and perhaps mendacious revelations, and even the
narrator’s own fantasies, dreams and doubts. Very little is clear in Rey Rosa’s narrative,
other than his extraordinarily crisp and lucid writing.

Severina could simply be an indulgent exercise in
literary self-reflexivity were it not for elements that enrich and buoy it
above that. Among them is the subtlety with which Rey Rosa incorporates his
literary themes. For example, there’s a good deal in Severina concerning
the mechanisms of exchange and consumption of literature, an implicit
questioning of the role of writers and books in forging one’s identity, and even
a hidden noir novel here, with a
murder, clandestine disposal of a body, closed borders, and secret deals to buy
silence and freedom. Also, the novel engenders a sense of ambiguity and
open-endedness, especially regarding the slipperiness of identity, that is both
disturbing and liberating, venturing well beyond its literary games. After all,
this is also the story of a love affair and of the sins of commission and
omission that permit that love to happen, as underscored by the book’s anchoring
epigraph from William Carlos Williams: “What power has love but forgiveness?”

It’s unsurprising that Roberto Bolaño thought of Rey Rosa as
“the best of [their] generation.” Both writers display an explicit fixation on
books and writers to the extent that they become material for their own works,
and both incorporate assertions about literature and books that raise questions
but remain deliberately inconclusive, the centerpiece at Rey Rosa’s book
banquet being a monologue by Señor Blanco (reminiscent of the “bookish pharmacists”
passage in Bolaño’s 2666) concerning “the tides and currents of books,” their
“migrations, invasions, outbreaks, extinctions.” One might be forgiven for
loving this.

I’m pleased that Severina, after The African Shore, was the second of Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s novels I read this year. I can’t say I
was surprised by Severina’s more circumscribed world of writers and
books, a focus with similarities to Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives and almost
sure to please fans of that book. But the wider divergence from this focus that is on display in The African Shore – and its meticulous,
crystalline-clear writing, captivating storytelling, complexity of
themes, unusual atmosphere combining a calm spaciousness with restive, colliding social tensions, and its unforgettable, almost instantly classic contribution to the genre
of works in which an animal serves as a nexus for human interactions – reveal manifold different capacities of this writer. I greatly look forward to discovering his other works.

I read Severina
(2011, English translation by Chris Andrews 2014, Yale University Press) for
Spanish Literature Month, hosted byRichardandStu.The African Shore, 1999, is translated by Jeffrey Gray and also published by Yale University Press (2013).

15 comments:

I must say, after reading your review I'm more eager to read this one than the one on the previous post. I love enigmatic women, sporting different colors (could it be as a representation of her background, seeming to be of many cultures?, and above all, the quality of loving books...seeking books...using books to embellish (forge?) one's identity. How wonderful that the book seller didn't apprehend her, but came to know her and fall in love with her.

I often wonder how it is that my fellow readers choose what books they will read next; it is endlessly interesting to me the different ways that we can go about this. Of course following the trail of a beloved author works, or reading from a specific country of origin works as well. But, reading the books which are mentioned in another book always appeals to me. I want to follow every trail laid before me.

One reason Severina is so…entrapping?...is just what you note in your second paragraph, that books mentioned in other books seem to have an irresistible pull. I haven't counted all those mentioned in Severina, but it's surely a few dozen, and even looking into one or two at random allows one to start seeing how they amplify themes in Rey Rosa's book and could lead one down all kinds of rabbit holes.

Barnes and Noble has this available for the Nook so you can be sure I'll buy it. Then maybe I can make a document of books listed (like the one you mentioned in Richard's blog about the rats listed in literature). It's a rabbit hole I'd love to fall down.

The only two Rodrigo Rey Rosa novels I've read to date were great but didn't seem anything at all like this description, so I guess it's time I read something else by him. I hear he has a collection of short stories which is also amazing, but Severina sounds pretty awesome. Thanks for the review.

She does play that femme fatale role, especially, perhaps, in her role with regard to disposing of the body (I'm trying not to give too much away), which could be right of James M. Cain. I'd love to see a film version of this. I'm not sure how a reference to Rolfe's Hadrian the Seventh might get successfully worked in, but the story would still survive a film adaptation (it's equally irresistible to try to make out titles of books people are reading in films, so there are great possibilities here…).

Great review. Funnily enough, I've just read Severina, and I'll be posting my thoughts in a week or so (to tie in with Richard and Stu's Spanish Lit Month). I loved this book, too - a beguiling narrative and Ana is such an elusive and evasive character. I love your comment about there being a noir hidden in here! When I post my review, I'll include a link to yours if that's okay with you?